One or more aspects relate, in general, to processing within a computing environment, and in particular, to sign extensions of load instructions.
Computer architectures have different types of load instructions that load data from memory, such as a cache, to a register. For instance, in the z/Architecture offered by International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y., there is a load logical instruction, and in the Power Architecture offered by International Business Machines Corporation, there is a load and zero instruction, each of which loads data of a particular size (e.g., byte, halfword, word) in a register of a larger size and then zeros out the remaining bytes of the register.
As a further example, both the z/Architecture and the Power Architecture include load instructions that load data of a particular size and then extend the sign bit in the remaining bytes.
The extending of the sign bit to the remaining bytes of the register is an expensive process.